Wisdom of the Ancients

Published in The Sunday Times, February 17th 2002

Divination
was the guiding principle of life in ancient times. People would barely
step outside the house without first consulting the will of the gods.
They wouldn't get married, go on a journey or declare war without performing
acts of divination. But now science is showing that at least some of this
apparently superstitious behaviour had a rational . basis, writes Robert
Temple.

One of the ancient specialities was interpreting bird behaviour to indicate
changes in the weather. We now know that birds can hear infrasounds -
sounds below the level of human hearing - from storm fronts hundreds of
miles away. By observing the birds' behaviour, people were able to predict
coming storms.
Similarly, the Roman author on architecture, Vitruvius, gave instructions
on how to choose the location for a city. He suggested grazing animals
be let loose on the site, then slaughtered and their entrails examined.
If signs of disease were found, a new site should be sought. Today we
call this technique an autopsy and it would indeed have revealed the presence
of poisoned water supplies or dangerous plants that could have been fatal
to a new settlement.

Recently conclusive evidence has been found that the sibyl of Delphi in
Greece presided near a chasm that emitted ethylene gas, which sent her
into a trance from which she produced her prophecies. Occasionally she
would get an overdose of the gas, and the writer Plutarch, a high priest
of Delphi in the lst/2nd centuries AD, records that one sibyl died of
it. The trances of the Delphic sibyl ,were long thought to be simulated
or imagined, but science has revealed their real origin.

Last year I was able to examine the Oracle of the Dead in Baia, an early
Greek colony on the western coast of Italy. The Oracle of the Dead was
a replica of the legendary Hades of the Greeks, complete with an artificial
underground River Styx 150ft long.

This was the place where Odysseus in the Odyssey and Aeneas in the Aeneid
"descended into hell" to consult the spirits of the dead. The
Romans sealed the site 2,000 years ago and it was forgotten. Scholars
had always assumed the visits to Hades were a myth, but like the "legendary"
site of Troy discovered in the 19th century, it has turned out to be a
real place.

So many of the so-called fantasies of the ancients have turned out to
be based on fact that perhaps we should re-examine our attitudes. Understanding
our ancestors with more objectivity can help us better understand ourselves.

Another remarkable confirmation of ancient observations relates to the
portents ascribed to comets. The ancients maintained that these brought
plagues and pestilence. In 1977 the late Sir Fred Hoyle, one of Britain's
leading astronomers, and his collaborator Chandra Wickramasinghe published
their theory that comets were dirty snowballs carrying bacteria and viruses
that were strewn over Earth when the comets passed close enough, occasionally
creating plagues.

At first this theory was derided by most astronomers, but recent evidence
favours it, and confirmation appears to have occurred last summer when
high-altitude balloons encountered large colonies of bacteria living 25
miles above the surface of the Earth, which apparently could only have
been seeded by passing comets. Another example of the ancients being right
after all.